Kevin Allocca: Why videos go viral

Over 48hrs of video are uploaded every minute, and only a tiny fraction of a percent get more than 1 million views. Going viral requires 3 things

Tastemakers: influential people enjoying the video and reposting it

Unexpectedness: With so much video out there, the viral videos have to be different.

Participation: Others want to be a part of this, create parodies and meta-references.

He talks through examples of videos with these features:

Double-Rainbow’s views spiked massively when it was retweeted by Jimmy Kimmel (tastemaker)

Rebecca Black’s Friday went big when a few people (tastemakers) started posting about it. From there plenty more people referenced it or parodied it – within days there was a parody for every other day of the week (participation).

Nyan Cat is extremely strange (unexpected), but also very easy to remix with different background music, set it in a different place, or post meta-references such as a cat watching a cat watching nyan cat (participation).